Newark Mayor Cory Booker is using his national profile to bring attention to difficulties faced by the working poor in getting nutritious food. On the counter top is the food that had to last him the week.
(Photo by Tim Farrell/The Star-Ledger)

NEWARK — Mayor Cory Booker’s week living in the life of a food stamp recipient is over and with it much of the national conversation surrounding the issue.

The media-savvy mayor may have lived on a meager diet of beans and yams, but he created a feast of publicity, both for himself and for the issue of government-assisted nutritional programs for the nation’s poor.

There were appearances on the Piers Morgan Show on CNN, Face the Nation on CBS and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and an endless stream of online posts. We learned about the vagaries of caffeine withdrawal, how to make meals last longer and forcing down a burnt yam when it’s all you have.

Yet as attention quickly returns to other issues, more than 840,000 New Jerseyans continue their daily struggle to survive on less than $5 a day. And in the third wealthiest state in the nation, life on the margins can be a bewildering maze of complex financial calculations where even the smallest disruption can ignite a devastating chain reaction.

"I can’t live without food stamps for a week," said Angelica Jaquez, a Newark native. "If not, we’d be starving here."

Jaquez, a single mother of three who is studying to be a home health aide, receives, $668 per month in food stamps through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, to make ends meet. It’s not enough.

Newark resident Angelica Jaquez is 24 feeds her daughters, left to right, Janiyah age 4, Destiny, age 3 and Natasha who is one. She relies on food stamps on a regular basis. Mayor Cory Booker's food stamp challenge is over but for more than 850,000 New Jerseyans life on food stamps is a daily challenge. Tim Farrell/The Star-Ledger

On Tuesday, Jaquez ran out of milk. For many that would mean a quick trip to the corner store. For Jaquez, it’s an obstacle course of finding money, keeping the kids safe and weighing how long she can go without.

Her situation is not unique. Researchers say having no wiggle-room in one’s budget can be disastrous if something unexpected arises, like an increase in a utility bill.

"A rich person who fails to plan, or who plans poorly, may simply cut back on frivolous expenditures," states the research paper ‘Savings Policy and Decision-making in Low-Income Households,’ published by Financial Access Initiative. "The lack of slack makes the poor walk a planning tightrope: they must, in effect, be super-planners in less conducive and less helpful surroundings, lest they slip deeper into poverty."

For Jaquez, there’s a Pathmark on Bergen Street in Newark, about five blocks from where she lives, but she shops at Extra Supermarket, a little more than a mile from her apartment, because, she says, it offers the better bargains. Sometimes she catches a ride there, but usually she walks.

Travis Edwards, who grew up in Orange’s Walter G. Alexander homes, said decision-making in the projects is often more dire than just walking a mile for milk.
"The rent will cripple you to the point where everything else is not a need," said Edwards, 24.

Between housing, electricity, heat and clothing, it’s not uncommon in poor neighborhoods to barter for other needs, he said.

"They’ll trade you 30 food stamps for $20 because they might get evicted," Edwards said.

Statewide, food stamp usage is down about 8 percent since last year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In September, about 842,000 New Jerseyans were on food stamps.

That bucks the trend nationally, where food stamp usage is up about 3 percent since 2011. Roughly 47.7 million Americans require some assistance, according to the USDA.

The statewide decline also belies the situation in Newark, where 77,088 city residents are on some form of assistance, up from 69,000 last year, city officials said.

Sister Linda Klaiss, who oversees the city’s Pierre Toussaint Food Pantry, run by St. Mary’s Parish, said Booker’s week-long challenge called attention to the reality of surviving on food stamps. However, she said, it could never truly approximate the life of the poor.

"At the end of the week, he can go back to buying his caffeine and selected foods and junk food and whatever that satisfied him," she said.

Last month, about 1,000 people came to the food pantry and received a bag filled with basics like milk, cereal, pasta, tomato sauce, and peanut butter and jelly. They come from Newark and surrounding urban areas like East Orange and Irvington. Since this summer, the number of food recipients at the pantry has steadily climbed, Klaiss said.

Despite her monthly benefit, Jaquez still needs extra help, She lives at New Community Gardens, a subsidized low-income housing complex on Bedford Street, and receives three bags of groceries each month from its food pantry.

Edwards said he appreciated the light Booker helped shed on poverty in New Jersey, but "if he wanted to take a real challenge he would have to live in poverty for ten or twelve years."